Twitter Flags Trump Tweets for False/Misleading Information
This has been a long time coming, and frankly, it’s too little too late.
While offering legitimate, fact based information to counter Trump’s lies is a good practice (essential, really; always cite your sources), nobody is going to read it. The articles they assembled in this case were dry and uninteresting. Plus, they only came from a handful of sources (namely CNN and The Washington Post) that most people who listen to Trump don’t take seriously, anyway.
Another issue with Twitter’s approach is that it’s too time consuming. Trump tweets dozens of times per day, and a lot of his tweets contain false/misleading information. It’s not feasible to construct a page like this every time. Instead, Twitter needs to start removing his false/misleading tweets altogether.
At the very least, the banners they attach to those tweets should be far less ambiguous. No more “get the facts about…”, instead, they should opt for “this tweet is fake news” or “he’s back on his usual bullshit”.
UPDATE: 5/27/20, 21:38;
Predictably, the response to this has been less than tasteful.
First, Trump exploded on Twitter (shocker).
Now, his administration has taken to targeting a single Twitter employee and throwing the force of their entire “hamfisted, vindictive, and cruel”* base toward attacking this individual.
Trump had a vitriolic reaction Wednesday morning to Twitter's decision to add fact-checking labels to some of his tweets for the first time, accusing Twitter and other tech companies of anti-conservative bias.
Now Trump allies and advisers have found a new target for their ire: Twitter's head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, who has tweeted harsh criticism of Trump in the past.
Roth's old tweets from 2016 and 2017 were resurfaced and shared widely on Wednesday, including a tweet calling Trump a "racist tangerine," a tweet decrying "ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE," and a tweet describing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as "a personality-free bag of farts." […]
Trump advisers are now presenting Roth's tweets as evidence of alleged anti-conservative bias across Twitter and other tech companies. Donald Trump Jr. slammed Roth on Twitter after Breitbart reported on his past tweets. On Fox News Wednesday morning, senior adviser Kellyanne Conway called Roth "horrible" and read his Twitter handle out loud on air.
What a disgraceful response.
Twitter won’t be taking any action against Roth for his tweets, and the company tells BuzzFeed News he was not responsible for the fact-checks. “No one person at Twitter is responsible for our policies or enforcement actions, and it’s unfortunate to see individual employees targeted for company decisions,” a Twitter spokesperson tells The Verge.